Rhizomes: Issue 30: Karen Barad

Issue 30 of Rhizomes, devoted to Karen Barad, is now available here. I have a highly sympathetic article in there that’s probably somewhat dated now as I wrote it a few years ago and have moved on to an ontology of folds that puts me much closer to her thought. The article is entitled “Phenomenon and Thing: Karen Barad’s Performative Ontology.” Many thanks to Karen Sellberg and Petra Hinton for all the hard work they’ve put into this!

https://sms.cam.ac.uk/media/2277379
“The presumptions underlying quantum mechanics make it relevant to a limited range of situations only; furthermore, its statistical character means that it provides no answers to the question ‘what is really going on?’. Following Barad, I hypothesise that the underlying mechanics has parallels with human activities, as used by Barad to account for the way quantum measurements introduce definiteness into previously indefinite situations.
We are led to consider a subtle type of order, different from those commonly encountered in the discipline of physics, and yet comprehensible in terms of concepts considered by Barad and Yardley such as oppositional dynamics or ‘intra-actions’. The emergent organisation implies that nature is no longer fundamentally meaningless.
NB: the slides for this lecture are available separately at http://www.tcm.phy.cam.ac.uk/~bdj10/Documents/Lindau2016-slides.pdf.
Clarifications added after lecture: agencies can be viewed as dynamical systems, so we are dealing with models involving interacting dynamical systems. The ‘congealing of agencies’ to whch Barad refers can equated to the presence of regulatory mechanisms restricting the range of possibilities open to the agencies concerned.”